No technology can protect whistle-blowers from themselves

MUCH can be lost because of the loose talk of a 22-year-old. WikiLeaks, an international publishing service for whistle-blowers, goes to extraordinary lengths to protect its sources, but it cannot control them. At the end of May the American army arrested Bradley Manning, who was said to be the source of a leaked video, shown on WikiLeaks, revealing how soldiers in an Apache helicopter killed unarmed civilians in Iraq. Mr Manning, an intelligence analyst, apparently betrayed himself by boasting of his actions to a stranger in an e-mail. The case is a reminder that WikiLeaks is only as robust as the humans who use it.

Julian Assange, an Australian former hacker, founded the service in 2007. It now has perhaps 800 volunteer technologists, activists and lawyers around the world. Media groups such as the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times provide legal advice. In addition to the Iraq footage, it has published evidence of corruption in Kenya, financial improprieties in Iceland, procedures for detainees in Guantánamo Bay and a string of Sarah Palin's e-mails. It has been so well run that Daniel Ellsberg, an ex-Pentagon analyst who leaked an internal history of the Vietnam war in 1971, assumed on first sight that it was a honeypot run by American intelligence.

Anyone can submit a document by old-fashioned post or over the internet and volunteers check its authenticity before publication. WikiLeaks wraps encrypted submissions in layers of junk data to obscure their size and origin, then routes them through servers in Sweden (where it is a crime to disclose a source) and Belgium (where a wiretapped conversation with a journalist is inadmissible in court).

As a further protection, the service hosts its data in several more countries, probably including Iceland, where Mr Assange has worked with legislators to draft a tough new free-speech law. Thus it is impossible for a single government or corporation to prevent a document from being published or to force its removal. As a result, WikiLeaks calls itself “multi-jurisdictional”.

Such precautions, however, could not protect Mr Manning, the army analyst, from his own indiscretion. He is said to have contacted a well-known American hacker, claiming that while on deployment in Iraq he lifted 260,000 classified diplomatic cables, among other things. He described how he would label a disk “Lady Gaga” (after a colourful American pop star), erase the tracks and replace them with classified data. The hacker contacted the FBI.

Leakers can have a variety of motives, some impure. In the past the press was the main channel for leaks and editors judged whether to publish sensitive information. Now those at WikiLeaks also take on that role, but without having to worry about libel and other laws. Such freedom may test the limits of democracy, in which rights to speech are balanced by duties to privacy and security. WikiLeaks may retort that it has the world's best interests at heart. But it remains unclear what form of redress exists if that ever proves not to be the case.